Carlègle’s illustrated album La plus belle fille du monde (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World) is probably the closest anyone will ever get to Egli’s inner world. It includes his observations of many aspects of French life during and immediately after the 1914–18 war, and shows considerable insight into the ways in which war and its aftermath transformed society, particularly the relationship between men and women. From his appreciation of different body shapes (‘une sciènce nouvelle’) to the relationship between artist and model, La plus belle fille combines image and commentary in a remarkably modern fashion given it was published more than a century ago.
The introduction to the album is by Carlègle’s friend, the author Léo Larguier (1878–1950); here is an edited version:
Leafing through this album, I thought of the things an excellent writer might write for a Paris newspaper, the alert qualities that current events demand: a lively, witty verve, a dense truth, cruel criticism, all written with a barely restrained pen topped with a sparkling froth of wit. But the truth is that these drawings are, in their own way, a lively Parisian chronicle. They are pleasant and light, as life should be.
We will first appreciate a few pages dating from 1915 and 1918, and there we will find the war that many artists did not have, and probably could not have had. When it comes to that conflict all that most who were involved remember is bare plains bristling with wire and telephone poles, with a hidden machine gun in the distance, making the monotonous noise of agricultural machinery. They would have searched in vain for the parades and theatrical cavalry charges.
The artist it took to counter all this was primarily a landscape painter, who shows us a camouflaged battery, the entrance to a sap, or, as Carlègle does, a beautiful nurse or a pretty, plump, scantily clad girl being carried to a ransacked bed by a soldier on leave, and we will know that we are in 1916 or 1918. The artist has miraculously rendered what made women beautiful during those years. From Alsace to the Aisne, in every hovel of earth and planks, one could see some of her images, and the art lover’s reveries before his favourite masterpiece doubtless never equalled those fostered by these quick sketches. Each had left behind a wife or a mistress.
At home the beloved was undressing in her safe boudoir. The tragic estrangement transfigured her, adorned her with seductive imagination. How pretty was that corner of her mouth and that dimple of her cheek, those curls of blond hair in the lamplight, that body blooming more than guessed at beneath the transparent chemise! The mirror showed her beautiful arms raised toward her chignon. The warm bed was white in a corner of the room; a warm perfume hovered around her rounded shoulders, and the immense desire for this lost paradise suddenly passed into the inhuman atmosphere.
We find all this in Carlègle's drawings dating from this period. We recognise Carlègle's elegant manner and mastery, a beautiful rump, the curve of a heavy breast, or the plump arm of a thirty-year-old brunette, yet he is not a prisoner of any particular cliché.
The artist whose album we are about to leaf through needs no interpreter, and I would be love to hear the laughter of the beautiful girls who are behind these pages as if behind a curtain.
They are Parisiennes, and they are charming women. They are slender, robust, healthy, and as blooming as Venuses, but all these Venuses have just taken off their fashionable dresses, their silk stockings and their light velvet shoes, and come under the spell of Carlègle’s witty, wistful pen.
